Words on the journey of raising a boy who eschews many social “boy” labels, and empowering him along the way.

Disrupting Norms

So, to follow up on my post about gender segregation among kiddos in play, as well as the amazing responses that folks offered on the various things we think are at the root of this, I ask for your thoughts again.

How do we start to disrupt these patterns? One “I only ‘comment’ in person” commenter suggested that we’re drawn to folks who share a similar energy to our own. So, following that line, what can we do during the early days of a young person’s life to feed that energy such that it is open and flexible, such that most boys don’t veer in one direction while most girls veer in the other?

Sure, there are the obvious things, like modeling, in our actions and our speaking ways that we can break out of the box of societal gender norms. But what else?

4 Responses

A friend showed me this article a few weeks ago, and while it’s more about race than gender, I found that it put words (and a bit of science) behind a lot of things I’ve noticed about how kids (and adults) divide up.

I also found it really encouraging that the advice the article gives on overcoming our tendency to group up with those similar to us is to name it, call it out, talk about it. Just saying “it doesn’t matter” and “we’re all equal” doesn’t cut it, kids are smarter than that. I loved the part where the kids were talking about skin color among themselves and they clearly knew that adults didn’t want to talk about this with them–so telling!

The article seems to think that we’re better at dealing with gender than race, but I’m not convinced. I think a lot of the observations about how people observe and react to difference in this article can apply to gender quite easily.

We try not to buy into the gender discrimination inherent in everything to do with kids today. It seems small and insignificant, but she has a blue winter coat. Her bed is brown wood, instead of white lacquer. She has some pink clothes, but we make sure to complement choices that are not pink. We deliberately celebrate the choices she makes that are not within the gender funnel. We point out that something being pink and frilly doesn’t actually make it fun to play with. We balance giving her toys for birthday and Christmas that fill her wishes for girly with her natural tendencies towards active, questioning, games and activities.

And one of the biggest things we’ve been trying to do is emphasize age-appropriate interests and toys. There’s this utterly weird and creepy push for 6 year olds to care about High School Musical and Hannah Montana, both of which are about high school age teenagers. We stress that a 6 year old should be interested in 6 year old activities. Because somehow the gender funneling seems to be connected to a push to be and think older than they are.

So, although she adores a dress with a full skirt (the bigger the twirl, the better the dress), and is longing for the day when her hair will be long and swingy, she also loves the fact of her strength and her muscles. All her family is constantly asking her to ‘make a muscle’ to show off her pipes to friends, which she does with pride (and she’s got crazy good pipes for a 7 year old!). She plays with dolls, but they’re usually involved in acrobatics and world domination. She goes cross-eyed with boredom at the thought of dressing her dolls as an activity. She loves Lego, and magic tricks, and astronomy, and writing. She’s proud of her climbing callouses, and is aiming to develop ‘elephant feet’ by walking barefoot whenever possible. As with your beautiful boy, she doesn’t see anything wrong or incongruous with any of this.

I mean, who knows how you successfully combat those messages over the long term? But when I was a little kid, my parents bought books and toys and had conversations designed to let me know that I didn’t have to be limited by others’ ideas of what a girl was. So that’s what we’re trying to do with her. We’re finding that between asking the questions, and honestly looking for her opinions and honouring them when they differ from ours, helps to model how okay it is to believe something that’s different from the norm. Our family is different in so many ways from the ‘norm’ (2 moms, interracial, adoptive) that she’s going to spend her whole life not fully fitting in. So we’re trying to show her that that’s not the end of the world. That she will have friends who will accept her for who she is. That she will be loved not just in spite of, but because of, her uniqueness. And hopefully she’ll learn, as I did, that her uniqueness is a gift that is pricelessly precious.

hi there – I stumbled upon your blog and have been poking around in your past posts to put the story together.
I wanted to comment so that I can tell you i think you are very brave, and very committed to that (incredibly cute) boy of yours. bravo. nice job.
I can see (from reading early posts) your conflict on how it might be perceived…being lesbians and now… raising a seemingly effeminant boy. people judge. but people are generally stupid 🙂
we raised a boy. my wife and i. someone – beyond anything we did or didn’t do – he is all man now. as a child he wanted to play sports – all sports. he was daring and brave and strong. did we push that on him because we wanted to be sure he would be a manly child of lesbian parents…of course not. i would have loved him the same if he chose to play chess …or if he loved fairies.
they are who they are, these kids. and you are such a wonderful parent for seeing that, moving above and beyond all the extraneous, and supporting him in all his wonderfulness.

One specific issue concerning gender in relation to young children that I discovered is that most people label all unknown domestic and wild animals male. I noticed when I would go to a pond where there were ducks or visit a zoo all the adults in the area talked about the animals using only male gender labels – he, him, look at that guy.
When our daughter was young I would flip it around and refer to the animals I could not ID as female. I would also do the same with construction workers in high buildings or other unknown gender workers. If someone was welding with a protective mask on I would comment at how SHE must have interesting skills and like heights or how strong she is…
I also think it is important that our children understand our natural world and gender roles in bugs, animals…. nature mixes it all up and learning about non traditional human roles is educational and so interesting.
– Oh, and cut out the Disney!